Salina shelter continues upgrades with Petco grant

Wednesday

A $100,000 grant from the Petco Foundation will allow the Salina Animal Shelter to buy vehicles and upgrade kennels.

The grant was the shelter’s third from the foundation. A $30,000 grant was received in December and a $45,000 grant in May.

Vanessa Cowie, animal services manager, said the new grant will allow for continuation of some of the work started with the earlier grants, including finishing concrete floors and replacing stainless steel kennel doors with glass.

Walking through the shelter, it’s immediately clear where previous upgrades stopped; a kennel with traditional galvanized steel bars is next to one with an upgraded glass front.

“Animal shelters are going away from that galvanized steel,” Cowie said. “They’re putting in stainless steel or glass. It’s just more sanitary and it looks better.”

The glass also prevents children from putting their fingers in the kennels, making them vulnerable to bites.

Various rooms also still have unfinished concrete floors.

“It’s kind of like a capital improvement plan,” Cowie said. “We want this facility to get to a standard where other people are envious of it.”

Better than acceptable

The shelter is funded by the city of Salina, but its budget of about $602,000 a year is geared primarily toward maintenance rather than upgrades. That’s what grants are used for.

One recent grant provided for construction of a post-operation recovery room for animals. Cowie said kennels in the recovery room are small to help prevent animal re-injury. The room is separate from the main kennels and out of public view so the animals have privacy while they recover.

“If you’ve ever seen an animal within a day of surgery, they’re lethargic, sometimes they vomit, they shake,” Cowie said. “It generates a lot of questions from the public.”

Vet students chip in

Dr. Brad Crauer, assistant professor in shelter medicine at Kansas State University, oversees the Kansas State Shelter Medicine Mobile Surgical Unit which comes to the Salina shelter every Wednesday. Crauer said the post-operation recovery room is helpful.

“We track our post-op complications and any kind of issues with those animals pretty tightly,” Crauer said. “There’s definitely evidence that having a post-op recovery room is beneficial to those animals.”

He said there are fewer post-op recovery issues when using the recovery room than when animals are placed directly back on the adoption floor.

Only two of the 12 locations in which the mobile unit works have post-op rooms. The other is Prairie Paws Animal Shelter in Ottawa.

The mobile unit is staffed by veterinary students from K-State who perform spayings, neuterings and other simple surgical procedures, Crauer said. Before the program started a little more than a year ago, Crauer said, the Salina shelter used local veterinarians to perform those procedures, which cost money.

Van to be purchased

The new grant also is being used for equipment upgrades, including purchase of a van that will replace an animal control truck that has a Fiberglas holding area.

Cowie said new animal control trucks, complete with Fiberglas cover, cost about $40,000. The van costs about $20,000 and will need about $10,000 in kennel installations and other improvements.

“We opened the bids up to local dealers, (to) anyone who wanted to participate,” Cowie said. “(We) told them what the specs were; we wanted it to be an extended height, we wanted to be able to walk inside of it, we want it to have everything (the Fiberglas trucks) have.”

Such necessities include internal heating and air conditioning in cargo areas, for the pets, as well as lights and backup cameras.

More welcoming

The van, which is dark blue, will be painted to advertise all of the shelter’s services, including pet adoptions and cremations. It will include images of kittens and puppies and the slogan, “Like us on Facebook.”

“Those trucks do 85,000 miles a year in the city limits of Salina and we don’t have any of our services on them, so we’re not advertising that, we’re not using that like it could be,” Cowie said.

She said that in the past, she’s had to borrow vans from other city departments or rent vehicles to take dogs and cats to sister shelters in Colorado. The new van will allow her to operate more independently.

–– Reporter Shelton Burch can be reached at (915)637-5065 or by email at sburch@salina.com

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